


Wolves Without Teeth

by galactiicace



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Character Death, M/M, Mc76 - Freeform, hoo boy, lycanthropy, not quite lovers, strap in fellas this one is gonna be a ride
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-26 17:24:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12063624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galactiicace/pseuds/galactiicace
Summary: Ten years spent in total isolation, this is the life Jack Morrison has given himself in the years following the attack. Summers bring anxiety and terror, as the heat pulls forth the beast beneath skin, and winters leave the empty reminder that he is, by his own choice, completely alone. But when he finds the mangled body of one Jesse McCree, a fresh wolf with injuries mirroring the ones Jack received a decade earlier, Jack finds his world thrown from a mundane, monotonous cycle, to that of a wolf fighting to stay alive, and keep the damn kid alive with him. And in the meantime, he just might find something he didn't realize he'd been looking for.





	Wolves Without Teeth

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway y'all gotta thank peacekeeper_revolver for this one tbh. We had a werewolf au before this nice lil au came into existence, and the idea of wolves changing with the temperature, rather than the full moon, is entirely their idea. But I've been itching to write this au for a while, and man I'm hella out of practice with fic writing but I'm also too lazy to fix this shit so it's gonna stay a goddamn mess. But yeah, expect some serious hurt with this one~
> 
> Follow me on tumblr! galactiicace.tumblr.com

Coffee comes first; strong, dark roasted, and bitter. There’s a pounding in his head, sharp and monotonous and continual, the type that comes side served with a hangover. But there is no alcohol, there hasn’t been in half a decade, though a bottle of whiskey lies untouched beneath the frame of his bed – the vintage is too rare, too special, and his situation too mundane to dare open it. It’s a hangover of a different variety, and a winded sigh escapes parted lips as he sits at the poor excuse for a table in the center of the room. 

Jack’s cabin is bare, a single room – save for the bathroom off in the corner – that houses nothing more than the bare essentials. His bed sits in the corner opposite the bathroom, and beside it, a small dresser with a lamp atop it. There’s books stashed beneath the bed, old copies collected through his years, all read to death and falling apart. Across the cabin was the makeshift kitchen: a sink, a small oven, an even smaller fridge, and a counter. A table sat off center there, old and worn and well used. The only thing worth attention was the fireplace centering the wall across from the front door, where warm embers, still aglow from the night before, chilled in the morning air.

The first sip of coffee brings a wave of relief to the exhausted features; Jack’s shoulders relax, the tension in his grit jaw releases, and he sinks against the back of the worn chair. The headache is still there, but this is manageable, this is an inconvenience at most. A hand pulls roughly at his face, rubbing the sleep away best he can, before fading blues shift to watch the dust that cascades through the sunlight streaming in from the singular window above his bed. For a moment, there is calm.

And then there is a scream.

.:.

The morning was as monotonous as the rest – the surge of sick as nausea washes over him, the pounding from behind his eyes, the taste of bitter coffee on his tongue, and then came patrol. A rinse and repeat cycle he’d clung to for years despite the fruitlessness of the task; in ten years, he’d never caught a scent that wasn’t his own. The field he’d found himself in a decade earlier had been forgotten in time, the woods swelling around the small land he’d claimed as his own, and masking him from the eyes of others in the neighboring towns. No one ventured this far out, he only had out of necessity, and with the belief that he was going to die. But the paranoia ( particularly in recent years ) had kept the tradition going, and like clockwork each day, he woke up, let the sick pass, had his coffee, and started out for the brim of the wood. Once or twice, he would look over the field with something as close to fondness as he could find these days – surprising vitality had been breathed into the field each spring, and the blooming wildflowers brought a sweet scent with them. A small lakefront greeted the edge of the entrance to the woods, a refreshing, chilled pool in the oncoming heat of summer. It was too cold now, but a month’s time would bring the warmth, and with it, summer’s anxiety. 

He was safe, for now. The air was still chilled, still brought the threat of snow with each passing storm. For now, the threat summer brought was nothing more than a nagging mite at the back of his head. In the end, he does see the irony; the heat of summer brings about the beast he willingly changes himself into day after day. But with this, he has control, he’s in his own head, in his right mind. Like this, he doesn’t mind it, even the pain that comes with the restructure of bone and body.

Jack was in his twenties when he was attacked, his body ravaged by sharp maw ( he can’t remember how many there had been, if it had been one or one hundred ) and dragged through miles of forest before he was left for dead. He’d only survived through sheer stubborn, and even that almost hadn’t counted for much. In reality, it had been the altered DNA that saved him, and what kept him on his daily path now. A wolf in human flesh, he was unyieldingly paranoid.

Jack’s nose is to the dirt, just like every day, as he stalks through the thick flora of the wood he’s claimed, eyes sharp to the movements through the trees as he goes about his routine. Fauna aren’t rare in these parts ( he’s killed enough in his days to survive ), and he makes note of each one that scampers up tree bark at his presence. A huff, not unlike a breath of laughter, leaves him as he walks slowly through. He’d grown up in the shallow ends of this very wood – far from where he now called home, but he knew the outskirts like the back of his hand, too many summers spent wandering instead of working the way he should have been.

But he pushes that thought aside, an ache of guilt in his chest as he pushes through the thick of the forest; the place he had once called home, the Morrison family farm that backed itself to the wood, was nothing more than a distant memory, one he attempted to suffocate before it bloomed into something more painful (as it often did during the nights ), one that he now chose to replace with his focus on the view ahead. 

In reality, he had picked up the scent some few yards back, but the breeze has kicked up, and with it, the unmistakable musk of blood. It’s not unusual, really, other animals in this part – wolves unlike what he is now, foxes, small carnivores that pick off the pieces of rotting squirrel, or on occasion, the wandering boar. This kill is fresh, though, copper taste on his tongue the closer he gets to its source, and, for a moment, he lets himself think of the feast he might have if there’s anything left ( a proper meal, not simply the bones of what he’d let others take ). Had he been a younger man, a more excitable man, he might have run the rest of the way, danced about his feast.

He doesn’t, though. And, as soon as the thoughts hit him, new nausea washes over him, stomach churning wickedly, as Jack encroaches on the scene, the source of the smell. If not for his own stupid sense of preservation, he would have turned to run back, pretend he’d never been here, and simply close himself off entirely in his cabin. But it’s honestly shock that keeps him rooted to the ground, staring at the mangled body on the ground, shredded by claw and tooth, not unlike how he had been once upon a time. What he had hoped might have been boar, or deer, or, perhaps, even wolf of pure nature, lies covered in its own blood, very much dying. And very much human.


End file.
